NONSSENSE: Purple State Fashion

TORSO and Douglas Coupland’s Social X-Ray of Post-Millennial Behavior

Photography: TORSO

Text: Douglas Coupland

In a fake news anthropological study for SSENSE, TORSO charts the suburbs of Ohio, home to both Abercrombie & Fitch and America’s most swing electorate. With a libretto by Douglas Coupland, Generation X author, the story explores the futuristic, post-millennial potential of the space outside of cities. To be in a purple state is to be stuck in binaries, hounded by targeted advertising, insurance markets, and political polling. Statistics rely on the idea that data can reify normalcy. But what if you could create your own bell curve far outside of the mainstream?

In the peripheral space, previously obscured hiding places reveal themselves. Technological change is accelerating in the rural intermediate, where identity goes beyond consumer category, a generation is more than a cultural moment packaged and commodified. Is technology designed to protect us from politics? Or vice versa? What is keeping us from being headless rather than just acting headless? To be a moving target is to minimize the potential for contact with malevolence.